Glenn Close and Johnathan Pryce playing a long married couple—Joan and Joe Castleman. They are thrown into a circumstance that brings on a full throttle life review — the type that people need as they move into their later years — a great adventure backward. The intimacy of those years does not wain but has an intensity that leaves the viewer waiting for the other shoe to drop.
There is a first grandchild on the way. Their twenty-something son seeks his own creative path from beneath the shadow of his famous literary giant of a father and— we think— shrinking personality of his mother. This is a story of two writers whose lives, children and work are so immeshed that it has allowed them to sublimate the truth— that they are neither one intellect nor a single spirit.
At First, the soft beauty of a New England landscape in early winter lures us into the family romance of the film couples’ enduring love affair. Then, the stark early winter of Stockholm, with its block architecture and grid format streets is quickly unsettling. The dialog written by Jane Anderson and based on the novel The Wife by Meg Wolitzer is delivered like bread crumbs trailing to the climax not of a melodrama but a riveting suspense…
See more on this film at Bioethics Screen Reflections http://www.bioethicsscreenreflections.com/2018/09/the-wife-and-bioethics.html